2010 Thinking, Part 1

Well, I made a couple of few-and-far-between posts about things unrelated to Japan, and then quit posting at all for the longest time due to realizing that…

For one thing, while Japan is less modern than my own country on women’s social/economic status, it may actually be more modern regarding respect shown to women behind closed doors, especially in matters of sex.

(…May be. I have to admit I have been feeling that more since I moved to a city near and influenced by Tokyo; attitudes here are certainly more modern than in the more provincial area I lived before. Also, now I am around mostly college-educated people. Before I was around all kinds of people, more of a cross-section than now, but spent a lot of time with some male friends absorbed in boys-club subcultures, and these folks’ attitudes skewed my view of attitudes held by Japanese men toward women, as they were certainly worse than average. As I was praying and hoping at the time, the very sexist feelings of “Friend #1” mentioned in my post titled Blog Rethinking [May 14th, 2009] are not representative at all. But I spent too much time back then being stressed out by his attitude.)

–Btw: when I say women are shown more respect behind closed doors, I am NOT trying to offer an explanation of the variety “but at home, the mother is the boss of the family, and all those powerful men, when they go home they are scared of their wives.” I HATE it when people do this; in my experience it’s always a way of excusing male dominance in society.

I don’t have a lot of time to ramble today about what I DO mean, but Thinking Part 2 will come soon. In the meantime, here is a paper I had read that had me paranoid for a while about the situation of rape in Japan:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/undergrad/cetl/ejournal/issues/volume1issue1/gray/

I was depressed at what I read here, but really, the negative attitudes reflected in this paper aren’t what I mostly see around me (especially the mention of a correlation between pornography and rape, which doesn’t ring true to me. At home in the U.S. I feel a lot more that men’s behavior is influenced by pornography. I don’t feel that way here, may discuss that more later).

 I wasn’t surprised to find another paper with a different point of view:

http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1999-pornography-rape-sex-crimes-japan.html

This paper traces the drop in rape cases since the 70s, and brings up the interesting possibility that rape may INVERSELY correlate with availability of pornography. Pornography was highly regulated during the American occupation and became much more available again afterward. The American occupation brought in a lot of harmful, negative-morality attitudes that have kind of messed up Japanese culture. Inevitable, since Japan was wrong in the war and needed to lose; the occupation was actually lighter than Japan expected it to be at the time. But still American control brought in with it some of the most poisonous influences in American culture, and Japan is still working on recovering from the sudden injection of alien taboos into their culture. More on this later…

But one more thing from this paper…wait, I can’t find the words now. I want to talk about this paper in a bit more detail in a future post so I’ll let it go, but it said that while number of (reported) cases of rape is low, rates of arrest and conviction are very high, I think it might have said highest in the world. In other words, Japan deals with rape better than you’d be led to believe by the scary language in the first paper, which of course doesn’t compare the situation in Japan with the even worse reality of rape trials in the U.S. and probably many other places.

Hearing this gels with my own experience of people’s attitudes here actually. It doesn’t surprise me that the first paper is written by one person, not a Japanese person, and that the second one is written by one Japanese and one non-Japanese author. (A great way to go! It’s not good of course for biased Westerners to go charging into countries that are not theirs and telling people what their problems are, but it’s also problematic to have biased native explainers invested in excusing away their culture’s human rights problems to the world, and having carte blanche to do so because of political correctness.)

Oh man, I actually don’t have time to get to the second reason I’ve stopped writing here, which is that some things that have always vaguely tugged at the back of my mind about the American approach to feminism have lately crystallized a bit more. I think there are some big mistakes in the American approach and I actually wouldn’t want to do my little part to spread it over here. Details later, on this and all the other things I said I’d discuss more later! Looking forward to getting back to collecting my thoughts on women in Japan.

(U.S.) Women denied health insurance coverage due to “pre-existing condition” of rape

Saw this this morning on Huffington Post. Info gained from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund’s Citizen Journalism Project:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/insurance-companies-rape-_n_328708.html

Excerpts:

「Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month’s worth of anti-AIDS medicine.

Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable….

…insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions….

Some women have contacted the Investigative Fund to say they were deemed ineligible for health insurance because they had a pre-existing condition as a result of a rape, such as post traumatic stress disorder or a sexually transmitted disease. Other patients and therapists wrote in with allegations that insurers are routinely denying long-term mental health care to women who have been sexually assaulted….

Turner’s story about HIV drugs is not unusual, said Cindy Holtzman, an insurance agent and expert in medical billing at Medical Refund Service, Inc. of Marietta, Ga. Insurers generally categorize HIV-positive people as having a pre-existing condition and deny them coverage. Holtzman said that health insurance companies also consistently decline coverage for anyone who has taken anti-HIV drugs, even if they test negative for the virus. “It’s basically an automatic no,” she said….

Nurses who deal with sexual assault cases say the industry’s policy creates a significant problem for those treating women who have been assaulted. “It’s difficult enough to make sure that rape victims take the drugs,” said Diana Faugno, a forensic nurse in California and board director of End Violence Against Women International. “What are we supposed to tell women now? Well, I guess you have a choice – you can risk your health insurance or you can risk AIDS. Go ahead and choose.”

Turner, now a life and casualty insurance agent, said she went without health coverage for three years after the attack. She second-guesses her decision to take the HIV drugs. “I’m going to be penalized my whole life because of this,” she said.」

* * *

Reading about health insurance struggles in the U.S. from here, it’s like watching someone have a nightmare and wanting to just shake them awake. Why can’t America grasp the depth of the inhumanity of current health insurance policies? The health of the public is not something you leave up to the money games of capitalism–as every other economically developed nation in the world knows. Every industrialized nation in the world besides the U.S. has a public healthcare plan.

I don’t have a lot specific to say about the way this punishes rape victims. Victims being punished is part of the way it works. The current health insurance industry is 100% capitalist, and unbridled capitalism is about those with power doing whatever they decide they can, because they can and they don’t have to think about its effect on anybody else…be they rape victims, domestic violence victims (also routinely denied coverage! in the news a week or two ago), or whoever…

NYT magazine on women in the developing world

ひさしぶり～

To anyone who may still be checking this blog…

I’m sorry for being away for months; I was traveling a lot and busy at work over the summer.

I’ll get back to those questions on consent right away.

For now a post or two with some reading material, not all about Japan…

The New York Times Magazine did a special issue called Saving the World’s Women. I’m working through it, just got through the front-article, 7 pages packed with things people should know more about. Some generous excerpts to get you wanting to read the whole thing:

page 1:

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape….

page 2:

Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China….

The massacre [of Tiananmen Square] claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.

Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed….

A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” [murder of a woman by dousing in gasoline and setting on fire] takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news….

page 3:

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century….

page 4:

….1 percent of the world’s landowners are women….

page 5:

Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room…. Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force….

The rest of the article includes success stories of three remarkable individual women from Pakistan, India and Zimbabwe, more details on  specific issues, and types of women-focused international aid that have been most effective.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1#

Questions on Consent Part 1

(This post has been edited. I was going to translate all these questions into Japanese, trying to do my little part should someone find me on a search engine…and then I realized that it’s really American culture that has more need to think about things like this. Japan’s issues with rape are more on a structural and legal level than traceable to common ideas about normal dynamics during sex, which seem not as bad to me here. I’ll muse more on this later. For now, I do still want to just repost the list in English.)

“Frozen Inside,” printed in Slug and Lettuce, original to be found on this page: http://www.anarcha.org/sallydarity/consent.html

By Cindy    

These are questions about consent that me and a friend of mine put together for a workshop we helped put together. They helped spark a lot of really good and important discussions in our community, and hopefully will be helpful for you all too. We ask that you read and think honestly about these questions one at a time. (You certainly don’t have to read the whole list in one sitting! In fact, we encourage you not to.) We wrote them hoping to provoke thought, and so we ask that you not be defensive, and that you think about them deeply, because that’s the only way that this can really help you and your community.    

1. How do you define consent?

2. Have you ever talked about consent with your partner(s) or friends?

3. Do you know people, or have been with people who define consent differently than you do?

4. Have you ever been unsure about whether or not the person you were being sexual with wanted to be doing what you were doing? Did you talk about it? Did you ignore it in hopes that it would change? Did you continue what you were doing because it was pleasurable to you and you didn’t want to deal with what the other person was experiencing? Did you continue because you thought it was your duty? How do you feel about the choices you made?

5. Do you think it is the other person’s responsibility to say something if they aren’t into what you’re doing?

6. How might someone express that what is happening is not ok?

7. Do you look only for verbal signs or are there other signs?

8. Do you think it is possible to misinterpret silence for consent?

9. Have you ever asked someone what kinds of signs you should look for if they have a hard time verbalizing when something feels wrong?

10. Do you only ask about these kinds of things if you are in a serious relationship or do you feel comfortable talking in casual situations too?

11. Do you think talking ruins the mood?

12. Do you think consent can be erotic?

13. Do you think about people’s abuse histories?

14. Do you check in as things progress or do you assume the original consent means everything is ok?

15. If you achieve consent once, do you assume it’s always ok after that?

16. If someone consents to one thing, do you assume everything else is ok or do you ask before touching in different ways of taking things to more intense levels?

17. Are you resentful of people who want to or need to talk about being abused? Why?

18. Are you usually attracted to people who fit the traditional standard of beauty as seen in the united states?

19. Do you pursue friendship with people because you want to be with them, and then give up on the friendship if that person isn’t interested in you sexually?

20. Do you pursue someone sexually even after they have said they just want to be friends?

21. Do you assume that if someone is affectionate they are probably sexually interested in you?

22. Do you think about affection, sexuality and boundaries? Do you talk about these issues with people? If so, do you talk about them only when you want to be sexual with someone or do you talk about them because you think it is important and you genuinely want to know?

23. Are you clear about your own intentions?

24. Have you ever tried to talk someone into doing something they showed hesitancy about?

25. Do you think hesitancy is usually a form of flirting?

26. Are you aware that in some instances it’s not?

27. Have you ever thought someone’s actions were flirtatious when that wasn’t actually the message they wanted to get across?

28. Do you think that if someone is promiscuous that makes it ok to objectify them or talk about them in ways you normally wouldn’t?

29. If someone is promiscuous, do you think it’s less important to get consent?

30. Do you think that if someone dresses in a certain way it makes it ok to objectify them?

31. If someone dresses a certain way, do you think it means that they want your sexual attention or approval?

32. Do you understand that there are many other reasons, that have nothing to do with you, that a person might want to dress or act in a way that you might find sexy?

33. Do you think it’s your responsibility or role to overcome another person’s hesitance by pressuring them or making light of it?

34. Have you ever tried asking someone what they’re feeling?

35. Do you think sex is a game?

36. Do you ever try to get yourself into situations that give you an excuse for touching someone you think would say no if you asked? i.e. Dancing, getting really drunk around them, falling asleep next to them.

37. Do you make people feel “unfun” or “unliberated” if they don’t want to try certain sexual things?

38. Do you think there are ways you act that might make someone feel that way even it’s not what you’re trying to do?

39. Do you ever try and make bargains? i.e. “if you let me______, I’ll do ______for you?”

40. Have you ever used jealousy as a means of control?

41. Have you made your partner(s) stop hanging out with certain friends, or limit their social interactions in general because of jealousy or insecurity? 41. Do you use jealousy to make your partner feel obligated to have sex with you?

42. Do you feel like being in a relationship with someone means that they have an obligation to have sex with you?

43. What if they want to abstain from sex for a week? A month? A year?

44. Do you whine or threaten if you’re not having the amount of sex or kind of sex that you want?

45. Do you think it’s ok to initiate something sexual with someone who’s sleeping?

46. What if the person is your partner?

47. Do you think it’s important to talk with them about it when they’re awake first?

48. Do you ever look at how you interact with people or how you treat people, positive or negative, and where that comes from/where you learned it?

49. Do you behave differently when you’ve been drinking?

50. What are positive aspects of drinking for you? What are negative aspects?

51. Have you been sexual with people when you were drunk or when they were drunk? Have you ever felt uncomfortable or embarrassed about it the next day? Has the person you were with ever acted weird to you afterward?

52. Do you seek consent the same way when you are drunk as when you’re sober?

53. Do you think it is important to talk the next day with the person you’ve been sexual with if there has been drinking involved?

54. Do you think people need to take things more lightly?

55. Do you think these questions are repressive and people who look critically at their sexual histories and their current behavior are uptight and should be more “liberated”?

56. Do you think liberation might be different for different people?

57. How do you react if someone becomes uncomfortable with what you’re doing, or if they don’t want to so something? Do you get defensive? Do you feel guilt? Does the other person end up having to take care of you and reassure you or are you able to step back and listen and hear them and support them and take responsibility for your actions?

58. Do you tell your side of the story and try and change the way they experienced the situation?

59. Do you do things to show your partner that you’re listening and that you’re interested in their ideas about consent or their ideas about what you did?

60. Do you ever talk about sex and consent when you’re not in bed?

61. Have you ever raped or sexually abused someone? Are you able to think about your behavior? Have you made changes? What kinds of changes?

62. Are you uncomfortable with your body or your sexuality?

63. Has your own discomfort or your own abuse history caused you to act in abusive ways? If so, have you ever been able to talk to someone about it? Do you think talking about it could be helpful?

64. Do you avoid talking about consent or abuse because you aren’t ready or don’t want to talk about your own sexual abuse?

65. Do you ever feel obligated to have sex?

66. Do you ever feel obligated to initiate sex?

67. What if months or days or years later, someone tells you they were uncomfortable with what you did, do you grill them?

68. Do you initiate conversations about safe sex and birth control applicably?

69. Do you think saying something as vague as “I’ve been tested recently” is enough?

70. Do you take your partners concerns about safe sex and birth control seriously?

71. Do you think that if one person wants to have safe sex and the other person doesn’t really care, it the responsibility of the person who has concerns to provide safe sex supplies?

72. Do you think if a person has a body that can get pregnant, it’s up to them to provide birth control?

73. Do you complain or refuse safe sex or the type of birth control your partner wants to use because it reduces your pleasure?

74. Do you try and manipulate your partner about these issues?

75. Are you attracted to people with a certain kind of gender presentation?

76. Have you ever objectified someone’s gender presentation?

77. Do you assume that each person who fits a certain perceived gender presentation will interact with you in the same way?

78. Do you find yourself repeating binary gender behaviors, even within queer relationships and friendships? How might you doing that make others feel?

79. Do you view sexuality and gender presentation as part of a whole person, or do you consider those to be exclusively sexual aspects of people?

80. If someone is dressed in drag, do you take it as an invitation to make sexual comments?

81. Do you fetishize people because of their gender presentation?

82. Do you think only men abuse?

83. Do you think that in a relationship between people of the same gender, only the one who is more “manly” abuses?

84. Do you think there is ongoing work that we can do to end sexual violence in our communities?

Blog rethinking…

I’m thinking I’ll change the idea of this blog a little, since I no longer have my Feministing readers. In Australia, plowing through a zine library, I found some wonderful resources on feminist issues that I found myself wishing were discussed more in Japan, so I think I’ll translate some of this stuff here. I’ll be starting with these two lists of “Questions on Consent” and “Myths about Rape” that I found in zines and was able to locate on the internet after getting back.

Rape is kind of my soapbox I guess; I can’t believe how many people, both men and women, both Americans, Japanese, and many other kinds of people, still think that rape is the fault of the victim (many people don’t say it that way, but they still seem to think that a low-cut shirt or alcohol consumption on the part of the victim are mitigating circumstances), or that rape is sex.

sex is something two people do, folks.

I’m a bit shaken up because recently I’ve found myself defending the statement “rape is always wrong” to two of my best friends.

friend #1, Japanese male: “But your high rape rate in the U.S. is because of how loosely you define rape. The way American people think, just because the woman says no it’s rape. In Japan we have a more severe image of rape…[blah blah blah dramatic nonrepresentative image of rape]”

And when the woman says no and you keep on, you would call that exactly what please!?

For what it’s worth, while I have spent some time on this blog ranting about how bad women’s place in Japan is, this is about the worst I’ve encountered. This is not a mainstream view, I am pretty sure, but rather my unsually chauvinist friend making half-baked and unfair assumptions about his countrymen to justify his own attitude.

I’ve seen “culture” used to justify rape and other (quite culturally un-unique) forms of female oppression way too often. Learn to separate issues of culture from issues of human rights, world. The same myths about women saying no when they mean yes, and about men not being able to control their sexual appetite, exist everywhere. (Not to say that myths can’t become self-fulfilling if repeated often enough, just that there’s no underlying human truth to these ideas, only social conditioning.)

friend #2, American female: “I’m saying I think the fault is on BOTH sides. These women are trying to manipulate men anyway…I know people like this. Anyway, I would never get MYself raped.”

Said despite me and two college-aged males chorusing together to tell her how wrong she is. Then a 60s-or-so dude sitting near our party, who has not spoken to us until now, butts in and tells her she is saying what the rapists say at their trials. I’m still not sure if she listened… Conversation occurred in Sydney; points for the one Irish and two Australian males who were pushing how wrong victim-blaming is.

Maybe these destructive ideas ARE more mainstream than I would like to think, or does my radar somehow perversely seek out friends who will drive me mad on this topic?

Be watching for the “Questions on Consent” coming soon, 84 questions which I will translate in increments of 12.

march 31st

Just a note: I’ve been busy, and my requests for attention to my technical problems at Feministing have been completely ignored, so I’m getting no comments here and thus haven’t worried too much about continuing to post until I have time to find other ways to promote the blog.

Anyway, I hated Tuesday, the final day of the fiscal year. All these women from various departments were brought around by their bosses to make their farewells before quitting. I think they were all women, every single one–members of the army of women who work the low-paid, secretary-type contract jobs. No guys quitting–guys don’t quit, guys are hired as regular employees and paid much better.

It’s true enough that job openings are not specified by gender; when you advertise for one of the contract jobs, it’s usually only women who show up. So it isn’t as simple as making affirmation mandatory or something like that–the law does require that government employees in equivalent positions receive the same pay regardless of gender, so they’re trying on a certain level. It’s subtler expectations women face in Japan that direct them toward these lower-quality jobs.

People seem to think it’s natural that a woman would go for these positions so she can have flexibility to care for her children; but many of the contract employees have the same or nearly the same hours as the regular employees, they’re just paid a lot less. Plus, with Japan’s ridiculously low birthrate problem, women are not so busy caring for kids these days. What’s the deal, who’s telling them they are not good enough for regular positions?

I hated Tuesday, I hated saying goodbye to all the women leaving because they had nothing to stay for, all these women being marched around to say their goodbyes by their male bosses who were comfy in their regular employment situations. And I hated that everyone found the whole thing perfectly natural.

Women in Japanese Literature: The Sound of the Mountain

Note: I haven’t heard from the Feministing folks about my technical problems, so I’ll start posting again and hope the problem fixes itself…

So! I recently finished reading The Sound of the Mountain (Yama no Oto), one of the major works of Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Published in serial form between 1949 and 1954 and set in contemporary postwar Japan, this book portrays the aging of Shingo, a Tokyo businessman. He has begun to have disturbing memory lapses and strange dreams and hallucinations, and to be troubled with questionings about the meaning of things around him.

A few passages in this book stand out to me for their direct address of women’s plight in Japanese society at the time. Shingo fully faces the tragedy of women’s stolen identity, but as with other things that trouble him in his everyday existence, he is pained by an almost too-sharp perception but a feeling of existential powerless to do anything about what he sees.

The first passage below is Shingo’s reflections upon the situation of his daughter Fusako, never his favorite child, who is about to be divorced and has just returned to her parents’ home, her two children in tow. From pp. 96-97 (all quotes are from the Tuttle edition of the 1970 Edward Seidensticker translation):

Fusako’s unhappy marriage…aroused a certain compassion in Shingo, too, but more frequently it was a source of irritation. For nothing could be done about it.

He was astonished at the extent of his helplessness.

No parent could do a great deal about the married life of his children, of course; but what was truly striking, now that matters had reached a point where divorce seemed the only solution, was the helplessness of the daughter herself.

For her parents to take her and the children in after the divorce would solve nothing. It would be no cure, and it would bring her no life of her own.

Was there then no answer at all for a woman whose marriage had failed?

In the next passage, Shingo’s wife Yasuko has just told him about a news story in which a happy and prosperous older couple committed suicide together. The husband left a note stating that he and his wife wished to go quietly away while they were still loved.

From pp. 144-146. Shingo asks: 

“Did the wife leave a note?”

“What?” Yasuko looked up in surprise.

“Didn’t the wife leave a note?”

“The wife? The old woman?”

“Of course. If they went off together, it would have been natural for the wife to leave a note too. Suppose you and I were to commit suicide. You’d have something you wanted to say, and write it down.”

“That wouldn’t be necessary,” said Yasuko briskly. “It’s when young people commit suicide that they both leave notes. They want to talk about the tragedy of being kept apart. What would I have to say? With a husband and wife it’s enough for the husband to leave a note”….

When a couple committed suicide together the husband left a note and the wife did not. Did the wife have the husband substitute for her, or act for the two in concert? The question had puzzled and interested Shingo as Yasuko read from the newspaper.

Living together for long years, had the two become one? Had the old wife lost her identity, was she without a testament to leave behind?

Was it that the woman, with no compulsion to die, went in attendance upon her husband, had her part in the husband’s testament, without bitterness, regrets, hesitation? It all seemed very odd to Shingo.

But his own old wife had said that if they were to commit suicide she would not need to leave a note. It would be enough for him to.

A woman who went uncomplainingly to death with a man—there were times when the opposite was the case, but usually the woman followed the man.

One more passage. Throughout the book, Shingo has been trying to persuade his married son Shuichi to curtail a flamboyant extramarital affair. In this passage, the affair has finally come to an abusive end, but Shingo, having heard that the former mistress is pregnant, finds himself at her house trying to guilt her into an abortion.

From pp. 232-233, again beginning with Shingo speaking:

“You must forgive me for asking, but I believe you are to have a child?”

“Do I have to answer that sort of question? If a woman wants to have a child, are outsiders to step in and prevent it? Do you think a man would understand that sort of thing?” She spoke rapidly and there were tears in her voice.

“Outsiders, you say—but I am Shuichi’s father. I imagine your child will have a father too?”

“It will not. A war widow has decided to have a bastard, that’s all. I have nothing to ask of you except that you leave me alone to have it. Just ignore it, as an act of charity, if you will. The child is inside me, and it is mine.”

“That is true. And when you get married you will have other children. I see no need at this point in having unnatural children.”

“And what’s unnatural about it?”

In this passage, as in others in the book, Shingo seems to know that his own behavior is despicable, but feels pulled along by the current of pre-formed conditions in the world around him–in this case expectations about family honor coming before individual needs.

I highly recommend this novel. It’s a bit slow-moving, but a profound meditation on the human condition. Kawabata’s sharp portrayal of how small, everyday phenomena can suddenly appear strange keeps surprising me.

technical problems at Feministing…

sorry for no post this week. I get my readers from Feministing, and right now my Feministing account is having problems so my crossposts aren’t showing up there. I have contacted the Feministing people and will give this just a little time to clear up, so I can try to crosspost again the items that have failed… If things move slowly, I’ll just start posting again next week regardless.

My own tea story

First of all, apologies for not posting until the end of the week, had some technical difficulties. *sowwy*

So now, my own tea story! As you may have picked up from my horrified narration, I don’t generally face the same expectations in the workplace that Japanese women do. “Western” females are stereotyped as independent creatures with a nature quite different from Japanese women. (This, if anything, makes the whole thing seem worse to me–Japanese are perfectly aware of how hard they are on their own women, but call it “just our culture.” I guess I have to be glad that my own ideals are respected, however, even if they are reduced to being just my own culture.)

I did one day come face-to-face with the tea monster in a place you would never expect: church!

Last year I was attending a tiny, 15-odd-people church (all Japanese, I was the only foreigner), where everyone sat around drinking tea and chatting after the service. One afternoon several women were all washing up the teacups–a bunch of them all crowded around one sink and just a few dishes, After examining the scene I decided I would just get in the way if I tried to poke myself in. So I stood aside and chatted with the pastor instead.

As the conversation was winding down, he looked at the women crowding around the sink and said…probably just trying to think of something to say… “Japanese women are so diligent. Are American women not like that?”

I was quite dumbfounded. I don’t remember what I answered.

How odd for it not to even occur to him that he wasn’t helping with the dishes any more than I was…and this in a church, where we are to wash each other’s feet.

He was quite a nice person in general, but this stuff seem to run pretty deep.

Question from a reader: Menstruation leave

Q: I remember learning about menstruation leave – as I recall you could take one day a month off with pay to accomodate – in Japan and thinking how great/dangerous that was. Does it still exist? I think it’s dangerous as it sort of says “poor weak woman, not as capable as a man” and great because sometimes it’s just so energy draining that it would be nice to stay home on the couch with a heating pad. What is/was the attitude of men in Japan about this?

A: It does exist. It’s not in my contract, but I know another city-employed foreign woman who does have it in her contract. I have actually never either seen a case of a woman taking the leave nor heard any man’s opinion on it, but I suspect it’s a non-issue. People don’t seem as creeped out by menstruation here: maxipad ads are all over TV, and people don’t hesitate to mention periods in conversation. Once, hanging out with my male best friend and some of his guy friends, I thought I had gotten myself into an embarrassment when somebody suggested going to the public bath. I couldn’t go because I was on my period, so I desperately whispered my problem to my best friend, only for him to announce it out loud without anyone blinking an eye: “Oh, it’s her woman’s day. Let’s go another time.”

So my guess is that menstruation leave is a benefit with no negative strings attached. For one thing, I doubt people ever really take it except in the most extreme cases (as Japanese employees have a tendency to avoid taking days off anyway to show loyalty to their employer), which would mean no resentment would arise over perceived overuse of menstruation leave, but having it there is still a nice gesture and a last resort.

Japan does, by the way, have paid maternity leave (like most developed countries but unlike the U.S.), even though as I’ve previously mentioned many women are pressured into a non-career track where maternity leave is not even an issue. The culture seems generally less anti-body than America. Toilet-related matters aren’t taboo; I’ve even heard people ask for advice on constipation in mixed company. Although I’ve got to say the obsession with skinny is even worse over here, I don’t see as much pure body-hating in Japan. More on body attitudes soon…